Past performance does not guarantee future results. Always test before you trade.
A–Z
ATR (Average True Range)
ATR (Average True Range)
An indicator that measures how much a market typically moves in a bar. It’s
most often used to size stops and targets so they adapt to volatility — a
wider stop in a busy market, a tighter one in a quiet one.
Artifact
Artifact
A saved version of your strategy. Every edit produces a new artifact, so your
history is preserved and you can compare versions.
See sessions, versions and artifacts.
Backtest
Backtest
A bar-by-bar replay of your strategy’s exact rules over real historical
prices, reporting how it would have performed. It’s run by fixed,
deterministic code — not the AI — so the same rules and data always produce
the same numbers. See is the backtest real?.
Continuous contract
Continuous contract
A single, gapless price history stitched together from a market’s individual
expiring contracts, so you can test years of data without the contract
changing under you. AskFutures uses back-adjusted continuous contracts. See
futures and symbols.
Commission
Commission
The modeled per-trade broker cost subtracted from your results. Defaults are
2.50/side for full-size contracts; you can
change them when you build or refine a strategy.
Crossover
Crossover
The moment one line crosses another — for example a fast moving average
crossing above a slow one, a classic entry trigger. A “cross above” and a
“cross below” are distinct events.
Drawdown
Drawdown
The drop from a peak in your equity to the lowest point before a new peak —
the deepest “underwater” stretch a strategy put you through. Maximum drawdown
is a key measure of how much pain a strategy demanded.
Entry rule
Entry rule
The condition that opens a position. Buy opens a long; sell short
opens a short. A strategy can be long-only, short-only, or both. See
strategies.
EOD (end-of-day) exit
EOD (end-of-day) exit
An exit that flattens any open position before the session closes, so nothing
is held overnight. It’s the default exit for day-trading ideas. See
risk & trade management.
Exit rule
Exit rule
How a trade gets closed — either a conditional exit (close when a condition
is true) or a structured exit (a stop, target, trailing stop, max-time, or
end-of-day close). See risk & trade management.
Filter
Filter
A condition that thins out trades without changing the entry idea — for
example “only between 9:30 and 11:00” or “first trade of the day.” See
strategies.
Indicator
Indicator
A calculation derived from price or volume — RSI, EMA, MACD, ATR, Bollinger
Bands, and so on. In AskFutures these are real TA-Lib
functions, not approximations. See signals, indicators and series.
Margin
Margin
The deposit your broker requires to hold a futures position. It sets how much
capital a contract ties up; it is not the most you can lose.
Micro
Micro
A smaller-sized version of a popular futures contract (for example Micro
E-mini Nasdaq,
MNQ) worth a fraction of the full-size product — cheaper to
trade and the usual starting point for testing ideas.Opening range
Opening range
The high and low established in the first stretch of the session (say the
first 15 minutes). Breakouts above or below it are a common entry idea. See
signals, indicators and series.
Optimization
Optimization
Searching across parameter values to see which settings would have performed
best over the test window. AskFutures runs every combination through the same
deterministic backtest. See optimization.
Parameter
Parameter
A named, tunable number in a strategy — like a moving-average length or a
stop size. Parameters are what you (or the optimizer) sweep. See
strategies.
Point value
Point value
How much one full point of price movement is worth in dollars for a given
contract. Together with tick value, it converts price moves into P&L.
Profit factor
Profit factor
Gross profit divided by gross loss. Above 1.0 means the winners outweighed
the losers over the test window; the higher, the more cushion. See the
metrics glossary.
Roll
Roll
The switch from an expiring contract to the next one. Continuous contracts
handle the roll for you so your test history stays gapless. See
futures and symbols.
Session
Session
The trading hours of a market on a given day. Many intraday ideas anchor to
the session — the opening range, end-of-day exits, and time-of-day filters
all reference it. See timeframes, bars and sessions.
Slippage
Slippage
The modeled gap between the price you’d want and the price you’d realistically
get. The default is 1 tick per trade and is subtracted from results.
Stop (stop-loss)
Stop (stop-loss)
A protective exit that closes a losing trade once price moves against you by a
set amount. See risk & trade management.
Sweep
Sweep
One pass of the optimizer across a range of
parameter values — for example testing stop sizes from 200 to 600 in steps of
50.
Symbol
Symbol
The short code for a futures market, like
MNQ (Micro E-mini Nasdaq) or CL
(Crude Oil). AskFutures covers ~74 CME Group symbols. See
futures and symbols and the
supported symbols list.Target (take-profit)
Target (take-profit)
A structured exit that closes a winning trade once price reaches a set profit.
See risk & trade management.
Tick
Tick
The smallest price increment a contract can move. Prices step by whole ticks,
never between them.
Tick value
Tick value
The dollar value of one tick for a contract — the building block for turning
a price move into profit or loss.
Trailing stop
Trailing stop
A stop that follows price in your favor, locking in gains as the trade works
and never moving backward. See risk & trade management.
VWAP (Volume-Weighted Average Price)
VWAP (Volume-Weighted Average Price)
The average price over the session weighted by volume — a common reference
line for whether price is rich or cheap intraday. See
signals, indicators and series.
Overloaded terms
A few words get reused for genuinely different things. Here’s how to read each one, depending on where you see it.| Term | Meaning A | Meaning B | Meaning C |
|---|---|---|---|
| Signal | A rule firing — an entry or exit triggers on a bar. | The per-bar signal data a backtest records under the hood. | The predicted trigger price for a pending entry. |
| Point | A price point — one full unit of price movement (see point value). | An indicator period — the number of bars a calculation spans (e.g. a 14-point RSI). | — |
| Day | DAY data — daily bars, one per session. | Day Trading — a strategy type that opens and closes within the session. | The day session — a market’s regular trading hours. |
| Lookback / period | The test window — how far back a backtest reaches (e.g. the last 1 year). | An indicator length — how many bars an indicator averages over. | — |
| Version | A strategy version — a saved artifact in your edit history. | An internal schema version — the plumbing format of the saved plan, which you never see. | — |
Signal
The most overloaded of all. Three readings:- A rule firing. The entry or exit condition becomes true on a bar and a trade is opened or closed. This is what traders usually mean.
- Per-bar signal data. Behind the scenes, a backtest records what each rule evaluated to on every bar — used to draw the Strategy Flow and verify the run.
- A predicted trigger price. For a pending entry (say a breakout above a level), the price the rule is waiting for.
Point
- Price point — one full unit of price movement; its dollar worth is the point value.
- Indicator period — the count of bars a calculation looks at. “A 14-point RSI” means RSI over 14 bars, not 14 dollars.
Day
- DAY data — daily bars, one per session, used for longer-horizon ideas.
- Day Trading — a strategy type that opens and closes positions within the same session and is flat overnight (the default type, on 1-minute bars).
- Day session — a market’s regular trading hours, which intraday rules anchor to. See timeframes, bars and sessions.
Lookback / period
- Test window — how far back the backtest runs (the default is the last 1 year). Phrased as “lookback” or “since 2020.”
- Indicator length — how many bars an indicator averages over, like a 20-period moving average. Often also called a “period.”
Version
- Strategy version — a saved artifact in your non-destructive edit history; every refinement adds one. See sessions, versions and artifacts.
- Internal schema version — the technical format of the saved plan. It’s plumbing you never see and shouldn’t confuse with your strategy’s version number.